It’s no secret that one-man blogs can make a lot of money. Steve Pavlina makes over $100,000 per month with his; Darren Rowse had an estimated $300,000+ month when he launched his last eBook and my friend Al’s site, Coolest Gadgets, was having $60,000 months way back in 2007.

In a sea of over 100 million blogs, these guys are the exception. It’s certainly not easy or quick to build a blog to reach these income levels. If it were, they wouldn’t be called the exceptions. Many bloggers will tell you that there’s no “one size fits all” strategy when it comes to building a huge blog. Well, I’m going to leave the personal sites alone, and possibly prove those people wrong by examining the Technorati Top 10.

I will first state that these are not the 10 biggest blogs in the world. You might never have heard of any of them and even if you have, you may never pay them a visit. They are simply the top 10 blogs in the world…according to the Technorati engine criteria. That criteria, based on “Authority”, is determined as follows:

Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behaviour, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.

In basic terms, the rankings are based on how many links a site has from other blogs and how many of their posts are receiving links.

Analysis

In order to learn how to build a Superblog, we must first look at factors that have helped the success of other top blogs out there. In this section we’re going to analyse:

The age of the blogs

How many posts they make per day

How long their posts are

The traffic of each site compared to their ranking

Site Age

I used the Wayback Machine to establish when each of these sites started actually looking like a blog. TMZ, for example, was a robot hobby site up until December 2005 when it started to cover celebrity gossip as it still does to this day.

Oldest Site: BoingBoing – 123 months (10 years and 3 months)

Youngest Site: Hot Air – 49 months (4 years and 1 month)

Average Age: 71.4 months (5 years and 11 months)

As expected, the age of a site doesn’t have a direct correlation to where it ranks in the top 10, but it’s clear that all sites have produced content for years to establish themselves as leaders in a niche.

Posts Per Day

I chose one day of the week to monitor each site in order to determine how many posts they were making on a daily basis. I made sure to choose a weekday as the post output of many of these sites decreased substantially on weekends.

Most Daily Posts: Huffington Post – 193

Least Daily Posts: Mashable – 21

Average Daily Posts: 55.2

With almost 200 posts per day, it’s hard to still think of the Huffington Post as a blog rather than an online newspaper or magazine. Yet, they’re still thought of one by Technorati so that’s why I’m including them here. I was surprised to see that so many of these sites are publishing more than 50 posts every single day.

Average Post Length

After establishing how many posts each blog tends to make on a daily basis, I then thought it would be interesting to see how long each of their posts are. I’ve already performed a similar analysis across different industries, but never one for the biggest blogs in the world.

Highest Word Count: Huffington Post – 1,235

Lowest Word Count: Gawker – 77

Average Word Count: 362

It’s interesting that the biggest blog not only writes the most content but also produces the longest articles. For sites that had a very small average word count, the focus of the article tended to be around a picture or a video.

Rankings Based on Traffic

As the final part of my analysis, I wanted to see if there was a correlation between how many unique visitors a site was getting and their rankings in Technorati. I used data from Compete.com which isn’t totally accurate but should give a decent estimation as to how much traffic these sites are receiving.

Most Monthly Uniques: Huffington Post – 8.4m

Least Monthly Uniques: Hot Air: 660k

Average Monthly Uniques: 2.7m

I don’t have a pro Compete.com account so can’t see the traffic stats for The Corner subdomain. Even though TMZ is getting far more traffic than the other 8 sites, it’s back in 10th place. To me this suggests that Technorati have a flawed algorithm or that celebrity sites simply get linked to far less than others. The audience of politics and web news blogs are far more likely to link to content they enjoy, rather than the readers of gossip blogs.

Building a Superblog

I already had quite a few ideas in mind about what it takes to build a Superblog which the research above has confirmed for me. If you are looking to build your own Superblog, here are the exact steps you need to do it…

Pick a Large Niche

The strategy for each of these top blogs is to simply produce a ton of content each day. If you write on a very focused or niche topic, you’re simply not going to be able to do that. The common categories for sites in the Techrorati Top 100 focus on things like general news, politics, gadgets, celebrity gossip, and web news.

These are all industries where there is something new to write about every single day. Not only can you write about what is being said by politicians and their parties, you can also give thoughts as to where the economy is going. You don’t just have to write about what each celebrity is doing, you can cover the wealthiest or who has sold the most records.

Each of these sites can produce so much content because they’re each in industries where there is a lot to say. There are tons of other angles you can take such as movie news, sports updates or even a blog about online games.

The point is simply that you should pick a niche where you’re never going to run out of things to blog about.

Decide on a Brandable Name

Because these blogs write so much, they don’t have as many people coming to their blog via feed readers as you would expect. Can you really take in 50-60 posts every day from your favourite blog in your inbox or in Google Reader? Unless you or other readers have nothing else to do each day, then probably not.

Instead, people come to these sites manually to see if they have new updates. Picking a brandable name means that people can easily come back to your site time and time again via the address bar in their browser or a search engine like Google.

Ideally, pick something that is easy to remember and relevant to your niche. Engadget and TechCrunch, for example, don’t leave much to the imagination about what their site covers.

Produce Masses of Content

This factor of building a Superblog is without a doubt the most important. While your content must be readable, relevant and of interest to your niche, it’s important that you can produce lots of it on a daily basis. The smallest site at 21 posts per day still produces 600 articles in a month. That’s a lot of work.

Because this is a true guide on how to build a Superblog, let me now say that you don’t need to produce all of this content on your own. Nor do you need a large amount of money to fund other people to get involved with you.

There are three options you can take to produce the content for your Superblog:

Write it Yourself – TechCrunch started out as a one-man operation with Michael Arrington, as did Mashable with Pete Cashmore. They produced all of their content themselves in the early days. Just remember it’s going to take up a lot of your time. Perhaps more than you have available.

Form an Alliance – If you have any sort of knowledge about what it takes to build a successful blog and know how valuable a huge website can be, you may be willing to recruit others who will trust in you that you can make this a success. Either have them work for free until you all make a profit and split it, or allow them to put ads on only the blog posts they write (there are plugins for this).

Hire a Team – AOL are employing this strategy right now with their powerhouse of content writers online (they own Engadget, Autoblog.com and others). They have put most of their efforts into pumping large amounts of content out onto the web on a daily basis in order to get tons of search traffic and to make money via advertising

If you can take things a step further then ideally you will have an Editor in place who watches over all of the content that is being produced. Search Engine Land, for example, has someone in place to make sure that a broad variety of content is being posted each day so that at least something appeals to their wider audience.

Some posts on Mashable are large in-depth guides to social media platforms while others are just posts with embedded Youtube videos. BoingBoing sometimes writes long articles but mostly has posts that are image based, video based, or just a few sentences.

Variety is key if you’re going to be producing so much content on a daily basis.

Stay Consistent

As I expected, none of the blogs in the Technorati Top 10 are even close to being new. Even though Hot Air was started four years ago, there was content on the domain in a similar tone for years before that. Anyone who thinks you can build a blog that has an audience of this size overnight is simply delusional.

Many people tell me that the growth of ViperChill is amazing and I should be really proud of what I’ve accomplished here. I really am, and I know the growth is quicker than most blogs ever achieve, but it has still taken over 7 months to get the point I’m at now. I own an absolutely tiny blog in comparison to these heavyweights.

Of course, I limit myself by choosing such a narrow niche and I’m not actually trying to build a Superblog, but I’m sure you get the point. If there’s anything besides not producing enough content that’s going to hold you back from growing a Superblog, it’s going to be giving up before you even really get going.

Tweak Your Approach Based on Engagement

The final step in building a Superblog is to refine what you’re doing based on how your audience responds to your content. Last year TechCrunch were a much bigger blog than Mashable. If you go by RSS feed subscribers and Technorati rank, you might think they still are. Yet, Compete isn’t the only tool showing them to be receiving a lot more traffic than TechCrunch these days.

75% more if their numbers are anything to go by. How did they do it? They refined their approach based on what readers wanted. I personally don’t care for their constant posts about Twitter, but the Twitter community does. Their account has 700,000 more followers than that of Techcrunch and they are on twice as many lists.

Mashable did what offline newspapers should have done a long time ago: They adapted to a changing landscape.

If you’re producing so much content on a daily basis, you’ll quickly learn the types of posts that are a) getting you the most search traffic b) getting you the most social media traffic and c) being engaged with the most by your audience.

Once you know this kind of thing, you can produce more of what works for you and your community.

P.S. We’ve recently been getting a lot of comments asking me to post more frequently. Don’t forget that you can subscribe via a feed reader or your email inbox (it’s free) and get updates every time they’re posted so you won’t have to keep checking back for new posts.

So, it’s really helpful if you want build a multi-author blog, but if you prefer the single player mode (like I do, for now), skyriders like Johnny Truant, Pavlina or Chris Brogan are a better source for analysis. That’s why I named my blog after me, and made it as UNQUE and Personal as possible !

Well, I’m going to leave the personal sites alone, and possibly prove those people wrong by examining the Technorati Top 10.

This is all about the steps involved in how you would build one of the biggest blogs in the world and yes, they are multi-authored. I wanted to step away from the typical one-man mission and share something a little different.

Glen, great post – gotta say I’m impressed with the quality of your posts – always very informative. As someone who’s been running my blog for 3 years and currently has over 400 blog posts, and am making money blogging, and through my social media consulting business – I gotta say the Super Blog is something I’ve always wanted to start, but could never find talented individuals who wanted to go all in on it. My thinking was always if you have 10 people all dedicated to one blog, constantly churning out content then you’re going to grow a lot bigger, a lot faster than if you all own 10 separate blogs on the same niche. The trick is of course convincing people to join you.

My blog actually lends itself well to being more general. http://www.theresabloginmysoup.com could be a good multi-topic and multi-author brandable blog. I once opened it up to open registration but didn’t get much more than spammers joining and submitting content. My thoughts now are instead of going multi-author off the bat – get my traffic back to where it was a year ago (took a few months off), open the door to Guest Bloggers, and then move from guest bloggers to hiring bloggers.

With that said -if anyone reading this thread wants to join forces and I have a pretty cool idea for profit sharing. Each blog post gets you a share in the monthly ad revenue. Whoever writes the most articles in a given month also gets a bonus of some sort. Top bloggers would be able to become editors, over other bloggers, and earn a quarter of a share for every blog post their bloggers post. Etc..

Hey Glen,
Another awesome post.. as usual 🙂
There are many sites, new to me and I am really impressed with kuffington Post !! Grreat
Btw. I am in the process of converting my blog to multi author blog.

Do you think you can build success mostly on content like these seem to have? If a new blogger were to write say 20 articles a day with no links would it begin to take off? This is what it seems to imply, that content not links is king?

As I briefly covered in the post, the content still has to be of interest to the audience. There are real people coming back to these sites on a daily basis because they like what they are reading on a certain topic.

You don’t need links to every individual post to get a lot of search traffic but you should be focusing on the real reader as well.

Thank you very much for the clarification. I am starting to build my blog and your website is a great source for sound ideas and that is why I keep coming back to your in-depth posts and print them even. I will focus on the content that is not just ‘ten minutes of fame’ but rather people will say, hey I want some more of that.

You’re spot on with the data presented in this post. Having worked at Gawker for a short period years ago, and later at Nymag.com, which is wholeheartedly aiming for superblog status (though after many years still hasn’t gotten there). I can say with firsthand knowledge that you’re 100% correct.

That being said, most of us never want to angle for superblog status.
1. The volume can kill your readers and your writers. As you noted with the number of posts these blogs churn out, they need many authors churning out multiple posts daily. This leads to burnout, and the quality of the posts quickly spiral to being worth nearly nothing. The intelligent readers that you and I have on our blogs aren’t interested in the content coming from superblogs, because most of it is nonsense.
2. It’s incredibly hard to achieve success. When you look at the above listed sites, what you don’t see is the heaps of sites who aimed to achieve superblog status but failed in the process (or are just lingering in obscurity). If your goal is a massive audience, you have to fight tooth and nail to obtain the readers. As you noted with TechCrunch, it’s so easy to fall as well.

What does all of this mean? For your average blogger, you don’t want to aim for superblog. It’s just not a plan if you want to write about what you’re passionate about. The truth is that you can support yourself with 3000 subscribers, if you stick to a small niche. This is how Viperchill has found success, it’s how my blog has found success. And it’s so much less soul-sucking than writing about Lindsay Lohan’s latest hypothetical boob job, or useless gadgets that no one will buy 14 times a day.

All of that being said, thanks for the post Glen. For those of us who want to take the superblog path, this is the way to go.

I knew a bit about your background in this area so it’s awesome to have you share your thoughts.

I’m not sure I agree on number 1. The content on sites like Engadget is usually very short, but they do have in-depth pieces that people love. Again, I think people come to them manually and just browse the news updates which they love, rather than subscribe to it all in a feed reader.

I agree with you at the end though that really wasn’t the point of the post. I personally think I could build a very successful Superblog while outsourcing most of the work involved.

I like the idea of having a super blog (:p) but, most of those sites i have heard of, some more recently and 1 or 2 i havent. The ones I have heard of, I had no idea they produced as many posts. Explains why I never finish reading engadget, i dont have time to shift through all the news personally. Which I guess is reader burnout? Now that you mention it as well, i find myself skipping through the “useless” gadgets, to find one interesting post. – As opposed to here, where I’m finding every post useful for myself, as well as being interesting. I’m also enjoying reading all the comments, which again, is different from the comments on “useless gadgets”

Cool looking at this post 3 years later to see where you guys are now with your blogs, Ev and Glen! I guess the super blog may be losing its appeal as the end goal. Many people are blogging for the joy of it, the freedom, and maybe even making some money. Wouldn’t a super blog just put you right back into the system that so many people are trying to escape from?

It will be fun to watch and see if the big, corporate blogs are the wave of the future for the medium. With Huffington Post blurring the distinction between blog and magazine and with many print medium including blogs with their online sites it will be interesting to see if the one-person show can continue to make a go of it.

I think the one person shows will continue to be successful. As Glen said, not everyone wants to read “generic content”, where it’s being churned out. I personally, like Glen, am (or rather was), sole author on one of my blogs. As i own several blogs, i dont have enough time to post everything up but, i find some of the stuff i could post up, from the likes of engadget etc, are, as Everette said, some of the posts are “nonsense”, or rather, posted to keep the content up. Which while there’s nothing wrong with that, i do find, some of it to be a “why would i/anyone want to read that?”. But, I guess, not everyone wants to read just the “best” of the news but rather all of it. So it works both ways.

Wow, looks like I have a long way to go. I’m glad that you pointed out the multi-posts per day. I have been just working on getting a single daily post, and am pretty proud of that, but in order to get a ton of traffic from the media sites, you need to have multiple posts, because not everyone wants to cover the same thing.

If you have a blogger doing a daily story about you, they are going to wan to find that unique tidbit that shoots across the screen and the only way to get that much attention is to create a TON of content every single day AND to make sure that the search engines are trackign you. If you create content and no one is watching then you are doing a lot of work for nothing.

Remember that this is just for Superblogs and definitely doesn’t have to apply to your personal ventures. I only post once or twice per week remember, and my growth is sufficient to make a living from if I wanted to. It all depends on your aims at the end of the day.

All your factors are absolutely right. Another great factor that rings loud is the daily posting schedule of this blogs, many of them posts tons of posts a day which an average blogger might not be able to do, as you suggest, getting a team of writers for your blog might be a better option.

I have an autoblog I never promoted, it is only one month and it is now getting close to 100 unique visitors a day, I make sure it posts a minimum of 20 posts each day.

I’m really not a fan of autoblogs to be honest. They steal the good content that other people have worked hard to create and they offer very little value (if any at all) to anyone who lands on their website.

Yet, I don’t see them dying anytime soon so that’s all I’ll say on the subject.

I use a plugin called WP Robot, It only scrapes content from news websites and articles sites and it retains the link as a credit to the author.

If you have a look at my autoblog, you might not believe it is an autoblog. I use my name on it (which I will remove soon) and some of those who knew me read it and were giving great comments as if I was the one who wrote the post.

You can have a look at techandtips.com

Thanks a lot,
-Onibalusi

PS: I started the autoblog as a result of your blog flipping case study, It is in the tech niche and I don’t think I can provide value in that niche. Do you think I can sell the blog if it has good traffic?

It is very possible you could flip it yeah. I’m actually doing the same myself at the moment, sites i’ve sold before I’ve written the content for but, someone recommended I should do this that and the other, fully set up an autoblog, likewise using WP – Robot. I haven’t tried selling it yet as I’m still working on the design but, it’s already getting more visits per day than another blog of mine, in the same niche, which is unique content. So I’ve now applied the same techniques to the blog I do work on but 1-2 posts per day, as opposed to around 20 auto posts, so it’s still getting more traffic.

Thats an awesome post and I really appreciate the time you took to show how the effort required around number of posts/post length help contribute to its success!

I know there is a direct collerlation between the number of posts and length of each for my own blog and the number of visitors but its also a little scary how much more effort I need to put in to be #1

Again, this is just aimed at Superblogs so you don’t have to worry about it unless you plan on building one yourself. You can still have all the success you want with a one-man operation that just posts a few times per week.

Comparing to the top of the world can be daunting sometimes…
I run two one-man-blogs, one on my travelling experiences and one on social media. And then I also have a full-time job. Hence if I get to comment other blogs on a daily basis that’s already a success!
I only started this year but traffic is picking up nicely. WordPress is helping a lot with full-fledged SEO…

Glad you’re site are picking up nicely :). And yeah, WordPress is great. I don’t think I could go back to another other blog software/cms now either. Just earlier me and my partner were talking about when we used to have Joomla on our site. A chilling thought -not that there’s anything wrong with Joomla but, WordPress just seems so much more versatile to me.
Btw, have you checked out the “WordPress SEO: The only guide you’ll need” on here?

I do like your analysis of these sites, but I must say that I always read more because of your intelligent communication methods that you use in your writing. Very few people use psychological wordplay like yourself and so I am more than glad to read.

It can be a good idea yeah, especially once you have a team together. Although getting that team together can take more time up than actually writing the articles yourself but, i guess it depends where you advertise you’re looking for help really. I’ve tried before and got all the people who just wanted a quick buck and ended up explaining for half an hour on MSN (or rather, repeating myself) that they weren’t the writer I was looking for. I could have written 2-3 articles in that time for my niche/the articles I write.

I too kinda did an informal analysis when I went to Technorati to get ideas on improving my blog and how I could possibly be #1 in that niche. When I checked the other high ranking blogs, a lot of these facts I kinda realized; but after reading this post it made it pretty clear. To say you went in depth would be stating the obvious but your suggestions were really great and hit on some killer points. Awesome post!!

Frequent guest posting is a great way to begin the early stage for multi-authored blogs in my opinion. As you build relationships with regular guest posters, go ahead and make the pitch to them to form an alliance to build a bigger blog overall.

As you said, one of the main reasons why these blogs can gain so much traffic is the wide variety of topics they cover. Personal and niche blogs are great for a one person team because it’s within the scope of what you’re able to do but covering 20+ posts a day is going to be very rough if you can’t commit fulltime.

I’d suggest starting your own blog in the beginning, really get to know the ropes and learn how to manage others through guest posting. As you build up, treat it like a business, start employing an editor (which you could outsource), begin hiring writers (even if it’s on a shared income basis to begin) and build up your momentum from there.

I think my blog is only about 3 million behind these 10 you mentioned. New to your writing Glen but I can really appreciate the hard work you’ve put in over the last 5 years to carve yourself out a place on the web. Enjoying your work and learning a ton from it. thanks man!

It is incredible how Pete Cashmore and Mike A turned their solo acts into 7 figure media companies. I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. These steps can apply to Talking Points Memo, or Digital Photography School. I would also add if your going to do this, make sure their is no “king” already in your desired topic, and make sure your topic has a enormous audience. By king I mean the “default site” on the topic, Its OK to have competion but not a king.

Also I agree with EV, start an expert business like steve pavlina or far beyond the stars, or i will teach you to be rich or viper chill. This is what i am trying to do with my own project. I could 10 minutes of your expert advice 🙂 to help me get to the next level… well at least I have my other income generating web properties to keep me going. Great post Glen, -David

Hi Glen!
I have been reading your blog for some time, have to say that I really enjoy your thorough posts especially this one! Great work. I would also say that achieving what you have, by 7 months is REALLY impressive. Another point from the comments that I think is important (although not regarding this post subject) – Content design. As a web designer I have to say that if someone wants his content to be read and enjoyed better, all the “breaks”, bullets, graphs, images etc. are the things that make the reader go on reading, especially when the post/article is long. I think you’re doing a great job with this.

Hey Yael, thanks for the comments.
I couldn’t agree more with you. Breaking it up with bullets, graphs, images etc, really does make a difference compared to other sites who just lump it all together. I also have to admit, it’s one of the things I’d omitted from my sites but, have started implementing it and it really does make a difference with how the article flows (which I have Glen to thank for that).

sounds like a good idea,
what about user generated content? i mean what if people were allowed to generate that massive content, like wikipedia for example? that would help a super blog come into existence very quickly , any ideas?

It could but, the problem with that is, it often attracts a lot of spammers. And with Wikipedia, while it is a fantastic source, users can/could edit it, to their advantage. I’ve only seen it once or twice on Wiki but, it proves it’s possible. That said, if you’re able to weed out the spammers and perhaps have an editor, you could also have some good posts. I think it depends on how much time you have, to deal with the non genuine posts, whether the good posts you get from it, are worth dealing with the bad ones.

I didn’t know you were friends with Al Carlton. I’ve been reading his blog for about 2 years and he’s the one that recommended I go to Elite Retreat – Shoemoney’s event.

I saw someone ask about Al’s traffic, you should just search phrases like “cool gadgets” “usb gadgets” “spy gadgets” etc. to get an idea where he gets his traffic (hint – search engines) and combine that with the fact that he has had the site for several years and you’ll see why it’s so successful.

Ok, this is probably overkill on the comments section. But Glen, BRAVO!

I seriously enjoyed this post, and I’d have to agree.. I enjoy and love your writing man. I come here more for you, than your content. So just keep posting, I personally don’t mind if it’s considered “golden material” all the time…but that’s just me.

Another great post!
Adding the The Huffington Post to the mix doesn’t really do the average stats any justice in my opinion. However, I appreciate the point you are trying to make and have gained a lot from this post.

Glen,
Thank you for taking the time and efforts to put all of this together. I can tell that you put a lot behind it. Don’t worry, you’re not losing that “creativity touch” as you mentioned in another post. 😉

Hi Glen,
Thanks for putting this post together. I always appreciate the anount of research you pass on.

With regards to creating a super blog; I have a personal finance blog. I have often wondered how this would be defined in terms of overall niche size. While it will take me a while to gain traction, I am able to cover a slew of information from getting out of debt, financial independence, savings rates, retirement planning, etc. What are your thoughts on the viability of a “personal finance blog” becoming a super blog.

Wow, Mars speaking his mind. Impersonal?….hmmm, not so sure about that . You see, I don’t come here to get all chummy chummy with the blog owner – I come here because he cuts away the fluff on a lot of posts and cuts to the chase. There’s true value in this blog – no smoke and mirrors. I’ll take value over impersonal anyday.

I loved the post. I have a couple of niche blogs right now. Both are about two years old and I wrote ebooks. I know I have to be consistent with posting on a daily basis and building backlinks through article marketing. Discipline is the key, however, it is sometimes so frustrating to compete with these authority sites. This is why I would like to become one myself! 🙂

I’ve just started out in the world of blogging, reading this article has been very helpful and given me a good insight into what is needed to push things forward, one thing ringing loud and true is the old saying ‘content is king’ .